The Three Ingredients of Hypergrowth
Beloved product, viral word-of-mouth, and the ability to ride the lightning
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
Dietrich's diagnostic for what hypergrowth companies share: an amazing product people love, built-in viral/organic distribution, and organizational readiness to scale through stages faster than normal companies. The key mechanism is that you cannot pay your way to hypergrowth rates and remain viable, so distribution must come from the product itself.
Origin
Carilu Dietrich's pattern recognition from advising Miro, Segment, 1Password, Bill.com and leading marketing at Atlassian through IPO.
Core principles
- 01You can't pay enough to grow at hypergrowth rates and have a viable company
- 02When one person uses the product, they naturally pull in the next person
- 03Hypergrowth companies jump through growth stages that take others five or ten years
- 04Homegrown leaders often haven't seen the next stage, so you must import that pattern
How to run it
- 1
Build a product people love to use
Make the product itself so compelling that excitement to use it drives adoption, the way ChatGPT or Miro whiteboards did.
Watch out No amount of advertising rescues a product people don't love; spend just amplifies the underlying experience.
- 2
Engineer viral, organic word-of-mouth
Design natural moments where users sell to other users, such as inviting a colleague to your Miro board or Confluence wiki.
Pro tip Users selling to other users is far more efficient than salespeople selling to other people.
- 3
Ride the lightning by hiring ahead
Keep hiring 2X and 3X leaders who have already seen the next stage of growth, and bring in advisors and mentors who know what great looks like at the next scale.
Pro tip Homegrown talent can fill the inside, but you need imported leaders who have lived the stage that's coming.
Watch out The next stage arrives before you know it, so waiting to hire the experience is too late.
In the wild
Dietrich used 1Password personally for over a decade, then at work, then on a family plan for her elderly father, then carried it into each new company she advised; a CPO similarly rolled it into 1Password's own org from a prior company.
→ This person-to-person, company-to-company spread put 1Password in Okta's top quadrant for users per new customer, a hypergrowth signature.
Common mistakes
Trying to buy hypergrowth with paid spend
Paid acquisition cannot sustain hypergrowth rates economically; without organic virality the growth is unaffordable and the company becomes non-viable.
Only promoting homegrown leaders
Leaders who have never seen the next stage struggle to keep up with the jumps, so failing to hire ahead or bring in advisors stalls the scale-up.
Is it for you?
Best for
A founder or growth leader trying to diagnose whether their company has the ingredients for hypergrowth
Not ideal for
Businesses in markets that inherently require high-touch sales from day one, such as some HR software
From the transcript
“in order to get hyper growth you have to have organic inbound and viral Word of Mouth you can't pay enough to grow at those…”
“those natural points where your users are selling to other people is is way more efficient than having sales people”
“they really need to kind of keep hiring 2X and 3X leaders who have seen the next stage of growth”
From the episode
How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career
Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian, Miro, Segment, 1Password)